Looking for Menzies, and the voters who might well decide the next government?

Try Box Hill, where apartment towers and cranes loom over Asian restaurants offering bargain menus in three languages. Or Templestowe, waiting at the bus stops sprinkled through suburbia where 20-somethings are trapped living with mum and dad by the housing crisis. On days off, they might be found swimming or walking in the bushland enclave of Warrandyte.

And on any day, they’re thick on the ground at work or play in the retail behemoth of Westfield Doncaster, though when asked to talk politics, most decline. Aiden, trying on footy boots, considers the question about what’s on his mind this election – his second as a voter – long enough to signal that what’s on top of his mind are global events. But he’s cynical, if not despairing.

“Protesters put pressure on our government to do something, but they can’t do anything,” says Aiden. “No one is going to listen to them.”

Claire Goulter, 23, is pushing a trolley loaded with rubbish out of the coffee shop where she’s working a shift. Sure, she’s up for a quick chat about the looming federal election and her vote in what may be one of the defining battlegrounds.

Goulter only enrolled in 2022 at the last minute and says if not for her mum getting on her back, she might not have bothered. Her lack of excitement about the electoral process is widely shared in her cohort, with Gen Z voters that year telling one survey their key motivation was to avoid a $99 fine.

Rolling up to the voting centre in Box Hill, Goulter recalls scanning the pamphlets thrust at her, each promising to fix something – housing, climate change, university HECS fees. She tucked them under her arm and when she got into the booth marked #1 next to the candidate she vibed with the most.

“I’m like, oh shit, okay. I didn’t really know what I was voting for.”

This time around she’s eager to cast a more informed ballot, she says, but she’s vague about her process. She’s suspicious of mainstream media, and determined to “collect as much information as I trust”.

From its creation in 1984 until 2022, this seat sprawling across Melbourne’s north east was a safe Liberal stronghold – middle-class, mature aged, and home-owning. But as Gen Z voters – born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s – come of age, the political identity of the electorate is shifting.

They are minimum wage workers, students and young professionals; long-term renters despite Menzies being markedly more educated and affluent than average. Gen Z and Millennial voters together now constitute 38 per cent of the Menzies electorate, a growing, sizeable chunk, albeit lower than the national average of 47 per cent.

Grappling with global upheaval, economic uncertainty and climate anxiety, many have little time for traditional politics. But it would be a mistake to interpret Gen Z’s detachment from politics-as-usual as indifference, according to pollsters and experts tracking their impact on this campaign.

More accurately, they should be recognised as “overwhelmed”, casualties of the firehose of information technology they were raised on, says Dr Intifar Chowdhury, a youth researcher and lecturer in government at Flinders University.

“You just need to look at the daily swamping of news,” she says.

Neither are they lazy or flaky, as they are often characterised – generalisations Chowdhury describes as condescending. “Calling young people lazy is testament to how out of touch somebody is.”

Such attitudes underplay the disruptive power of this bloc. A generational turning point in Australian politics, 2025 is the first time Millennial and Gen Z voters will outnumber Baby Boomers at the ballot box.

Today’s young adults are navigating a vastly different path to adulthood than previous generations, Chowdhury says, with traditional milestones like homeownership, parenthood, and long-term commitment being postponed.

“That means you’re younger for longer.”

Younger voters have disconnected from the traditional party loyalties that defined their parents’ and grandparents’ voting behaviors, she says. While Boomers were generally stable lifetime voters who looked to the major parties for cues, Zoomers are more volatile.

“Younger people are more likely to be issue-aligned, rather than partisan-aligned,” Chowdhury says.

“So rather than looking up to political parties, what they do is think about, ‘Okay, what issue am I most concerned about?’, and then take that to the poll and make a voting decision.”

Many find the political landscape baffling, which is entirely understandable, says Chowdhury.  “I study politics and heck, it can be quite difficult to dissect it.”

Young voters are hungry to better understand what is going on, says Sam Koslowski, co-founder of indie online news service, The Daily Aus, but “the political system and the traditional media system just aren’t doing enough to explain how power works and how decisions are made to engage them in the political process”.

The trick to building election literacy is to meet young people where they are, Koslowski says, which is why The Daily Aus produces digestible, conversational explainer-style content. “The way that we kind of frame how we’re covering the issues is simply as if we were the friend in your group chat who you could ask smart questions to, that you might be afraid to ask at the dinner table or in a lecture or in the workplace … it’s a non-judgmental kind of explaining.”

The upshot is a growing audience and strong revenue, on the back of an audience retention rate of 90 per cent compared to an average of 60 per cent for news podcasts in Australia, he says.

It shows that young people are not tuning out. On the contrary, Koslowski argues, Gen Z is more politically active than other generations.  “They just express their activism in different ways.”

This was reflected in a 2021 global survey of 10,000 Gen Zs which found 70 per cent are involved in a social or political cause, often advocating through how they spend and earn more powerfully than other generations.

In 2025, with nearly two-thirds of Australia’s Gen Z getting their news from social media, if campaigners want to reach as many Australians as possible, “then how can you ignore podcasts and how can you ignore some big content creators?”, says Koslowski.

Recognition of that reality has seen a scramble by major parties to hop on influencer podcasts and drop cringy diss tracks on youtube. Depending on your perspective, a high/low point in this election was when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese bewildered veteran politician hacks when he called the Coalition “delulu with no solulu” (a reference which required translation from younger colleagues).

But superficial engagement with young voters isn’t going to wash, warns Dr Aaron Martin, an expert on youth attitudes to politics at the University of Melbourne.

Making politics accessible to young people is not just a matter of boiling down complex policy arguments into a TikTok bite, which potentially “degrades what is a pretty consequential decision”, says Martin. He wants to see high school programs focusing on tackling sliding civics understanding to lift the conversation up rather than dumb it down.

Back in the mall Jason – another 20-ish second time voter who politely declines to share his full name – gives an unsolicited endorsement to The Daily Aus when asked if he’s plugging into the election. The university graduate says the site is his go-to resource – “it provides you with what you need to know”.

An edited version of this story is co-published in collaboration with Crikey.com